At the same time as four former Vancouver mayors and our current mayor have added their voices to the chorus at Stop the Violence BC calling for regulation of the marijuana trade to reduce gang violence, the Harper government is going in the opposite direction.
Bill C-10 will impose a mandatory six-month sentence on anyone growing more than six pot plants. Grow more than 200 and you?re guaranteed a one-year sentence, the same as for sexually assaulting a child. The maximum sentence for growing marijuana jumps to 14 years, the same as for raping a child with a weapon. For business-minded observers, the economic cost of this insane scaling up of the war on cannabis is a phenomenal waste of tax dollars. Any CEO who started making up ?facts? to justify massive spending initiatives the way our federal government and prohibition supporters do would be dismissed at the next board meeting.
First, let?s set the economic stage.
According to the Fraser Institute, marijuana is a $6 billion to $7 billion industry in B.C.
Darryl Plecas, director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Research at the University of the Fraser Valley (and a supporter of marijuana prohibition), says it?s at least in the billions, with outdoor grow operations forming the single largest industry on Vancouver Island. That?s a lot of jobs, mostly export jobs – about 70% of marijuana is grown for export.
According to Stop the Violence BC, the cannabis trade in B.C., being homegrown, produces profit margins much higher than imported heroin and cocaine, whose user markets are a fraction of the domestic cannabis market of an estimated 430,000 users.
According to Plecas, B.C.?s marijuana operations are directly connected to organized crime and gangs, with the number of gangs up to 130 or more today from eight to 10 a decade ago.
?The single largest source of funding for gangs and organized crime in B.C. is grow operations,? he told a Senate committee in 2009.
In other words, our current methods of curbing cannabis use are consistently backfiring.
So we have an industry with highly desirable economic benefits, but they flow to gangsters rather than to public goods, resulting in fear and murder in our communities. To change this situation, we plan to do more of the same, even though there is no proof that mandatory minimum sentences reduce drug use or crimes related to drugs.
As the report of Stop the Violence BC puts it, ?No study has shown a beneficial impact of drug law enforcement on reducing drug market violence. ? Despite more than an estimated $1 trillion having been spent on the ?war on drugs? in North America during the last 40 years, cannabis is as readily available today as at any time in our history. ? By virtually every metric, cannabis prohibition has clearly failed to achieve its stated objectives.?
Continuing on this path is, to borrow Einstein?s famous lesson, insane – thinking that doing more of the same thing will produce a different result.
Not just insane, but costly. The Harper crime initiative is widely agreed to result in billions of dollars of new costs. Not all are cannabis-related, but many are: cannabis-related arrests in Canada have risen to 65,000 in 2009 from approximately 39,000 in 1990.
The solution is obvious and embraced by the 69% of British Columbians recently polled who agreed that B.C. would be better off taxing and regulating the use of marijuana: forget about mandatory sentencing for cannabis growing, end the prohibition that creates the violence, cut out the biggest source of profits for gangs, regulate the production, use and access to cannabis to reduce harm and recover all hydro costs, reap the tax benefits and free up jail space for real criminals. ?
